Near Space Ballooning: The Almost Final Frontier

When I first heard about amateur high altitude photographers last week, I was in disbelief that something like this could be so accessible. My astronomy professor did say that this field was the last scientific field where amateurs could make significant contributions, but ordinary people taking pictures that NASA needed rockets and space shuttles to take? That seemed too good to be true. I think it is amazing that people are innovative enough to come up with ideas like this and be able to do it much more cheaply that the methods NASA used and all it took was a digital camera, a weather balloon, a GPS, and a tank of helium. Granted, theirs was an unmanned mission, and NASA has better quality cameras, and NASA is able to accomplish more and study more than one thing in each space shuttle mission, but it is still really cool that people can do this by themselves. NASA should seriously consider employing these methods to get more photos of the edge of the Earth's atmosphere. An amateur balloonist spends a couple hundred dollars per mission to gather these photos, while NASA spends hundreds of millions on each of their missions. A lot can be learned from amateurs exploring space as a hobby. It is too bad that other fields of science require higher levels of qualification, because the most innovative minds are not always the ones with the advanced degrees or the ability to focus on just one field.